Replies to post #14505 on Apple Inc (AAPL)

[chensk]

Dilleet: ARM partnership was inked when John Sculley was CEO.

- kc

[langostino]

dilleet - buy decisions

I believe the Jobs II management gets credit for AKAM, which was a 1998 deal, although I suspect it might have been in the works for some time prior to that.

ARMHY dates back quite a ways, certainly pre-Jobs II. And it produced the lionshare of profits from equity investments. My initial recollection was more than $200 million, but after glancing at the 10-Q tfigs posted, that figure is probably a bit low. It might be closer to $250 million.

The strategic aquisitions I listed previously are the very positive and laudable part of the Jobs II legacy. Perhaps we can divert the conversation back in that direction.

Getting FCP from Macromedia ... that's a fascinating deal to me. I would love to hear more about it. How it came to be, what Apple had to do to get it from where it was when they bought it to the first FCP release. And the Spruce and Astarte acquisitions and the evolution of iDVD. That kind of came right out of thin air. iDVD has never really gotten the kind of "headline" press I think it deserves. I'm sure there's an interesting story there too.

[langostino]

dilleet - SINA and your noodles

When SINA first went parabolic I had some things to say about the market dynamics that fueled the end of the parabola, namely that a big part of the move was fueled by smaller hedge funds and fast money daytraders who didn't know the first thing about SINA other than it was moving up with big momentum, and that those kinds of parabolic moves are more often than not followed by pretty ugly retraces.

I believe that offended you because it seemed to infer there couldn't possibly be real business fundamentals to support the destination of the parabolic move. As it turned out, this was one of the rare exceptions, and your knowledge of Chinese culture, the viral spread of cell phones there, and the massive demand for ring tones and uptake on SMS enabled you to know that this was the real deal -- the rare exception with the parabolically growing fundamentals to support the shares even after the initial band of fast money momentum traders elected to cash out.

So hats off to you for that.